These are the two Kuwaiti roadways, littered with remains of 2,000
mangled Iraqi military vehicles, and the charred and dismembered bodies
of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, who were withdrawing from Kuwait
on February 26th and 27th 1991 in compliance with UN resolutions.

US planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the
front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for
hours. “It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” said one US pilot. The
horror is still there to see.

On the inland highway to Basra is mile after mile of burned, smashed,
shattered vehicles of every description – tanks, armored cars, trucks,
autos, fire trucks, according to the March 18, 1991, Time magazine.
On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in
gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and
awful under the sun, says the Los Angeles Times of March 11,
1991. While 450 people survived the inland road bombing to surrender,
this was not the case with the 60 miles of the coastal road. There for
60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is
shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell
fragments. No survivors are known or likely. The cabs of trucks were
bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground, and it’s
impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were
melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel.

“Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,”
said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. This one-sided
carnage, this racist mass murder of Arab people, occurred while White
House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater promised that the US and its coalition
partners would not attack Iraqi forces leaving Kuwait. This is surely
one of the most heinous war crimes in contemporary history.

The Iraqi troops were not being driven out of Kuwait by US troops as
the Bush administration maintains. They were not retreating in order to
regroup and fight again. In fact, they were withdrawing, they were going
home, responding to orders issued by Baghdad, announcing that it was
complying with Resolution 660 and leaving Kuwait. At 5:35 p.m. (Eastern
standard Time) Baghdad radio announced that Iraq’s Foreign Minister had
accepted the Soviet cease-fire proposal and had issued the order for all
Iraqi troops to withdraw to postions held before August 2, 1990 in
compliance with UN Resolution 660. President Bush responded immediately
from the White House saying (through spokesman Marlin Fitzwater) that
“there was no evidence to suggest the Iraqi army is withdrawing. In
fact, Iraqi units are continuing to fight. . . We continue to prosecute
the war.” On the next day, February 26, 1991, Saddam Hussein announced
on Baghdad radio that Iraqi troops had, indeed, begun to withdraw from
Kuwait and that the withdrawal would be complete that day. Again, Bush
reacted, calling Hussein’s announcement “an outrage” and “a cruel hoax.”

Eyewitness Kuwaitis attest that the withdrawal began the afternoon of
February 26, 1991 and Baghdad radio announced at 2:00 AM (local time)
that morning that the government had ordered all troops to withdraw.

The massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violates the Geneva
Conventions of 1949, Common Article III, which outlaws the killing of
soldiers who are out of combat. The point of contention involves the
Bush administration’s claim that the Iraqi troops were retreating to
regroup and fight again. Such a claim is the only way that the massacre
which occurred could be considered legal under international law. But in
fact the claim is false and obviously so. The troops were withdrawing
and removing themselves from combat under direct orders from Baghdad
that the war was over and that Iraq had quit and would fully comply with
UN resolutions. To attack the soldiers returning home under these
circumstances is a war crime.

Iraq accepted UN Resolution 660 and offered to withdraw from Kuwait
through Soviet mediation on February 21, 1991. A statement made by
George Bush on February 27, 1991, that no quarter would be given to
remaining Iraqi soldiers violates even the US Field Manual of 1956. The
1907 Hague Convention governing land warfare also makes it illegal to
declare that no quarter will be given to withdrawing soldiers. On
February 26,199 I, the following dispatch was filed from the deck of the
USS. Ranger, under the byline of Randall Richard of the Providence Journal:

“Air strikes against Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait
were being launched so feverishly from this carrier today that pilots
said they took whatever bombs happened to be closest to the flight deck.
The crews, working to the strains of the Lone Ranger theme, often
passed up the projectile of choice . . . because it took too long to
load.”

New York Times reporter Maureen Dowd wrote, “With the Iraqi leader
facing military defeat, Mr. Bush decided that he would rather gamble on a
violent and potentially unpopular ground war than risk the alternative:
an imperfect settlement hammered out by the Soviets and Iraqis that
world opinion might accept as tolerable.”

In short, rather than accept the offer of Iraq to surrender and leave
the field of battle, Bush and the US military strategists decided
simply to kill as many Iraqis as they possibly could while the chance
lasted…

While America and Europe changes their social media profile pictures
to show solidarity with victims of one European country, then another,
victims of terrorism in non-European and American countries are
receiving virtual no attention – let alone sympathy – when they receive
even higher death tolls from ISIS.
After the horrific attack on Brussels, it’s worth noting how the
major attacks that have recently been carried out by ISIS, or
ISIS-sympathizing groups, have been reported in the media – and
subsequently how they have been received on social media:

March 22, 2016, Brussels, 34 killed – HEADLINE NEWSMarch 20, 2015, Yemen, 137 killed – no headline
April 18, 2015, Afghanistan, 33 killed – no headline
June 26, 2015, Tunisia, 38 killed – no headline
June 29, 2015, Yemen, 35 killed – no headline
October 10, 2015, Ankara, Turkey, 97 killed – no headlineOctober 31, 2015, Russian plan, 224 killed – HEADLINE NEWSNovember 21, 2015, Beirut, 43 killed – no headlineNovember 13, 2015, Paris, 130 killed – HEADLINE NEWSDecember 2, 2015, San Bernardino, 14 killed – HEADLINE NEWS
January 8, 2016 Libya, 50 killed – no headline
March 6, 2016 (only two weeks ago), Baghdad, 47 killed – no headline
March 13, 2016 (last week), Grand-Bassam, 22 killed – no headline
March 15, 2016 (last week), Ankara, Turkey, 35 killed – no headline
ISIS is killing more Muslims and Africans than any other group. Yet
for some reason Western media is only highlighting when Europeans and
Americans get killed.
This feeds into a “Muslims are against us” mentality, when in fact
what we are facing is an imperialist terrorist cult, that targets
Muslims more than any other group of people.
Just last week, Grand-Bassam’s beaches were filled people enjoying the Sunday afternoon.
With temperatures on the rise, many across Ivory Coast came to the city’s oceanfront resorts to enjoy the ocean.

For terrorists, this was a perfect opportunity.
Six figures all in black appeared on the beach, wearing balaclavas
and carrying guns. Before anyone could process what was going on, the
terrorists opened fire.
They had AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades, which they used on anyone within sight.

They marched across the sand, shredding men, women and children – both Ivorians and foreigners alike.
When security forces arrived, the terrorist gunmen killed two of them as well.
“They killed a child, despite him kneeling down and begging,” one
witness told the BBC. “They shot a woman in the chest. I swear, I heard
them shouting ‘Allahu Akbar.’ They’ve killed innocent people.”
But aside from sources like the BBC and NPR, this story was simply not covered in the mainstream Western media.

The phrase “a Pig War” used in the title of this article has
been mentioned in a number of previously published articles. Today, in
view of another episode of escalation of inter-Korean relations, this
phenomenon will be explained in detail. First, let us look at the causes
of the new wave of antagonism. If we focus on the role of mutual
demonization and agitation, we will notice that a few factors heavily
contribute to the transformation of a misunderstanding into a hostility.

First,
demonization drastically reduces the chances for the resumption of the
inter-Korean dialogue. And there is a certain logic behind that, “How
can we engage in negotiations, or maintain “hot lines,” or the system of
mutual awareness with them, a true embodiment of evil?” Consequently,
the tools that are normally employed in the settlement of
misunderstandings preventing them from descending into conflicts prove to be ineffective in a situation of mutual distrust.

Secondly,
demonization is the root cause of distorted reality that manifests
itself in several ways. First, any activity of the other party will be
(incorrectly) interpreted as harmful based on the assumption that the
other party is a bunch of “bloodthirsty ill-wishers.” Accordingly, any
activity will be viewed as a preparation for a provocation or as a
provocation in progress.

At
the same time, analysis and expert examinations are twisted to play the
role of yet another cog in the propaganda machine. Naturally, in the
situation of mutual resentment, those trying to voice the true state of
affairs will be silenced and those “greasing the wheel of propaganda
machine” will be in trend. What does the world see as a result? A
phenomenon where people first invent a propaganda construct and then
uphold it as the ultimate truth. And it is nearly impossible to convince
them to abandon their delusion.

Demonization
also leads to a mutual agitation manifested in two ways. First, both
parties act on the principle of an asymmetrical response, i.e., they
harshly retaliate for any minor provocation. In other words, when a
country is on the “red alert,” the shoot-and-kill tactic is applied each
time something seems to be suspicious.

Second,
mutual agitation creates a stressful environment for the parties to the
conflict. The lower strata of the society experiences the most severe
pressure. That, in turn, increases the chances of an inadequate reaction
to some strange or unusual events.

As a
result, the likelihood of a conflict triggered by an insignificant or
engineered cause increases tremendously and is often referred to as “the
Pig War.”

Here
is a hypothetical situation. Let us speculate how things will develop
in it. A pig is rustling in the bushes of a demilitarized zone. There
are military personnel on either side of the zone. They have long been
on the verge of a nervous break and have been subconsciously waiting for
an enemy provocation. They are ready to leap into action to settle
accounts with the scoundrels from the other side of the demilitarization
zone.

One
of the parties (it does not matter which one) loses the nerve and,
having decided that it is not a pig in the bushes, but creeping
saboteurs, opens fire. Having heard shots coming from the other side,
the other party returns fire. It also reports to its leadership that it
has (in compliance with the instructions) harshly retaliated for a
provocation.

The
party that started shooting at the pig and received a return fire also
retaliates severely, while reporting to its commanders that it has been
attacked without a declaration of war. In the aftermath, each party
actively blames the other party for being attacked for no apparent
reason. Then zealous military steps in: “Won’t you finally give us a
chance to teach these scoundrels a lesson!” Then politicians join the
choir: “This time we must not soften the issue and let them get away
with it! We cannot afford to act as some weaklings. We must keep up our
country’s prestige in the eyes of the public!” But situation is such as
there is no way to determine what triggered this turmoil. On the other
hand, nobody really cares to find out either. Because those who were
wishing for a turmoil are now rubbing their hands.

Another
point is that in these circumstances the overall picture of the
political situation and military power of the opponent’s country can be
significantly distorted. Ideological “blinders” can grant tremendous
assistance as well. As a result, the parties might find themselves in a
very unpleasant situation. For example, the South might believe that the
“senseless bloody regime” of the North is about to collapse and that it
really makes plans to attack the defenseless South. The South might
also believe that there is a strong Christian opposition in the country
and that mass protests are about to erupt. Basing their assumptions on
these imaginary believes, they would expect that intervention of South
Korean or American military aiming at the elimination of nuclear sites
or the top country officials would gain support of the country’s
population, or would, at least, resemble the plot of a Korean action
movie. The North, in its turn, might believe that fancy reports about
South Korean indestructible might are just reports, that the change of
the puppet regime is inevitable and that the highly praised warriors of
the US Army are cowards unable to fight without high-tech bathrooms and a
24-hour supply of ice cream. As a result, both parties would be
preparing for an armed conflict not with the real North or South, but
with some fictitious characters from the distorted “cartoon/propaganda reality.”

That
seems like quite a realistic scenario for the initiation of a conflict.
And it would be very difficult to discern where the fiction ends and
the reality begins. Because at some point the damage suffered by each
party would be so significant that nobody would be able to walk away by
just saying “oh, we are sorry, it was just a misunderstanding”
without losing their face. And that means that it would not matter
anymore who initiated the fire. The winner’s version would go down in
the history books.

The
readers could notice that the topic of risk of “irrational factors” and
the role of an accident, which is much more serious than it might seem,
has been brought up in our articles on numerous occasions. It was zoomed
in to show that despite majority of people think of politics as of
something orderly, planned in advance and targeting long-term political
goals, in reality things sometimes happen chaotically. And if ordinary
people cannot understand something, they immediately classify the
situation as an intricate combination of moves devised by some cunning
politicians. In this context even “the Pig War” described above could be
interpreted as a crafty design developed by the top officials. And this
is why the irrational factor is so serious and so dangerous. And this
is why the readers are reminded of it whenever it is appropriate to
bring this subject up.

The
survey, which was only one question: "Who would you vote for in the
elections to the Duma?", The site was attended by 2 thousand 487
respondents - it is even more than in the standard opinion polls, which
are conducted by VTsIOM, but naturally. it does not take into account the sociological sample.On the leading place was the Communist Party, which received 44.4% of the votes polled.Remained in second place, "United Russia" won only 8%, while the other parties have failed to overcome the 5% barrier. 4.7% received "Falcons Zhirinovsky" further ahead "Socialist", located "Homeland" with 3.9%. Same result - by 3.6% scored "Fair Russia" and "RPR-Parnas", 0.1% of them are behind "The Communists of Russia".As
for the other parties with an opportunity to participate in the
elections to the State Duma without collecting signatures, the "Apple"
has collected 1.8% of the vote, "party of pensioners" - 1.1%, "Patriots
of Russia" - 1%. "Just Cause", "Civic Platform", "Green" and "Civil Force" were the result of lower than 1%.

Seeing the government in Damascus as too far to the left, Washington has been trying to orchestrate a regime change in Syria since at least 2003

Documents prepared by US Congress researchers as early as 2005
revealed that the US government was actively weighing regime change in
Syria long before the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, challenging the
view that US support for the Syrian rebels is based on allegiance to a
“democratic uprising” and showing that it is simply an extension of a
long-standing policy of seeking to topple the government in Damascus.
Indeed, the researchers made clear that the US government’s motivation
to overthrow the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is
unrelated to democracy promotion in the Middle East. In point of fact,
they noted that Washington’s preference is for secular dictatorships
(Egypt) and monarchies (Jordan and Saudi Arabia.). The impetus for
pursuing regime change, according to the researchers, was a desire to
sweep away an impediment to the achievement of US goals in the Middle
East related to strengthening Israel, consolidating US domination of
Iraq, and fostering free-market, free enterprise economies. Democracy
was never a consideration.

The researchers revealed further that an invasion of Syria by US
forces was contemplated following the US-led aggression against Iraq in
2003, but that the unanticipated heavy burden of pacifying Iraq
militated against an additional expenditure of blood and treasure in
Syria. As an alternative to direct military intervention to topple
the Syrian government, the United States chose to pressure Damascus
through sanctions and support for the internal Syrian opposition.

The documents also revealed that nearly a decade before the rise of
Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra that the US government recognized that
Islamic fundamentalists were the main opposition to the secular Assad
government and worried about the re-emergence of an Islamist insurgency
that could lead Sunni fundamentalists to power in Damascus. A more
recent document from the Congress’s researchers describes a US strategy
that seeks to eclipse an Islamist take-over by forcing a negotiated
settlement to the conflict in Syria in which the policing, military,
judicial and administrative functions of the Syrian state are preserved,
while Assad and his fellow Arab nationalists are forced to leave
office. The likelihood is that if this scenario plays out that Assad and
his colleagues will be replaced by biddable US surrogates willing to
facilitate the achievement of US goals.

In 2005, Congress’s researchers reported that a consensus had
developed in Washington that change in Syria needed to be brought about,
but that there remained divisions on the means by which change could be
effected. “Some call for a process of internal reform in Syria or
alternatively for the replacement of the current Syrian regime,” the
report said. Whichever course Washington would settle on, it was
clear that the US government was determined to shift the policy
framework in Damascus.

The document described the Assad government as an impediment “to the
achievement of US goals in the region.” [4] These goals were listed as:
resolving “the Arab-Israeli conflict;” fighting “international
terrorism;” reducing “weapons proliferation;” inaugurating “a peaceful,
democratic and prosperous Iraqi state;” and fostering market-based, free
enterprise economies.

Stripped of their elegant words, the US objectives for the Middle
East amounted to a demand that Damascus capitulate to the military
hegemony of Israel and the economic hegemony of Wall Street. To be
clear, what this meant was that in order to remove itself as an
impediment to the achievement of US goals—and hence as an object of US
hostility—Syria would have to:

● Accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state on territory
seized from Palestinians, and quite possibly also Syrians and Lebanese,
possibly within borders that include the Golan Heights, annexed from
Syria by Israel in 1987 and occupied by Israel since 1967.

● End its support for militant groups seeking Palestinian
self-determination and sever its connections with the resistance
organization Hezbollah, the main bulwark against Israeli expansion into
Lebanon.

● Leave itself effectively defenceless against the aggressions of the
United States and its Middle East allies, including Israel, by
abandoning even the capability of producing weapons of mass destruction
(while conceding a right to Israel and the United States to maintain
vast arsenals of WMD.)
● Terminate its opposition to US domination of neighboring Iraq.

● Transform what the US Congress’s researchers called Syria’s mainly
publicly-owned economy, “still based largely on Soviet models,” into
a sphere of exploitation for US corporations and investors.

US government objections to Syrian policy, then, can be organized under three US-defined headings:

● Terrorism.

● WMD.

● Economic reform.

These headings translate into:

● Support for Palestinian and Lebanese resistance groups.

● Self-defense.

● Economic sovereignty.

Terrorism (support for Palestinian and Lebanese resistance groups)

The researchers noted that while Syria had “not been implicated
directly in an act of terrorism since 1986” that “Syria has continued to
provide support and safe haven for Palestinian groups” seeking
self-determination, allowing “them to maintain offices in Damascus.”
This was enough for the US government to label Syria a state sponsor of
terrorism. The researchers went on to note that on top of supporting
Palestinian “terrorists” that Damascus also supported Lebanese
“terrorists” by permitting “Iranian resupply via Damascus of the
Lebanese Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah in Lebanon.”

Hezbollah supporters wave Hezbollah and Palestinian flagsduring a demonstration against the Israeli offensive in Gaza

US Secretary of State Colin Powell travelled to Damascus on May 3,
2003 to personally issue a demand to the Syrian government that it sever
its connections with militant organizations pursuing Palestinian
self-determination and to stop providing them a base in Damascus from
which to operate. In “testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee on February 12, 2004, Powel complained that ‘Syria has not
done what we demanded of it with respect to closing permanently of these
offices and getting these individuals out of Damascus’.”

The Syrian government rejected the characterization of Hezbollah and
Palestinian militants as “terrorists,” noting that the actions of these
groups represented legitimate resistance. Clearly, Washington had
attempted to discredit the pursuit of Palestinian self-determination and
Lebanese sovereignty by labelling the champions of these causes as
terrorists.

WMD (self-defense)

“In a speech to the Heritage Foundation on May 6, 2002, then US Under
Secretary (of State John) Bolton grouped Syria with Libya and Cuba as
rogue states that…are pursuing the development of WMD.” Later that
year, Bolton echoed his earlier accusation, telling the US Senate
Foreign Relations Committee that the Bush administration was very
concerned about Syrian nuclear and missile programs. By September 2003,
Bolton was warning of a “range of Syrian WMD programs.”
Syria clearly had chemical weapons (now destroyed), though hardly in
the same quantities as the much larger arsenals of the United States,
Russia and (likely) its regional nemesis, Israel. Citing the
Washington Post, Congress’s researchers noted that Syria had “sought to
build up its CW and missile capabilities as a ‘force equalizer’ to
counter Israeli nuclear capabilities.” It should be noted, however,
that the idea that chemical weapons can act as a force equalizer to
nuclear weapons is not only untenable, but risible. In WWI it took
70,000 tons of gas to produce as many fatalities as were produced at
Hiroshima by a single US atom bomb. To have any meaning at all, the
concept of WMD must include weapons that kill massive numbers of people
(nuclear weapons) and exclude those that don’t (chemical weapons.)
Otherwise, it is a propaganda term used to magnify the non-threat posed
by countries seeking independence outside the US orbit which have CW and
biological weapons, but which weapons are no match for the United
States’ nuclear weapons and are dwarfed by the Pentagon’s own CW and BW
arsenals. Deceptively labelling these weapons as WMD, makes a non-threat
a large threat that must be dealt with through military intervention
and thereby provides a public relations rationale for a war of
aggression.

U.S.-trained rebels in Syria hand over weapons to al Qaeda affiliate

As to the substance of Bolton’s assertion that Syria had a wide range
of WMD programs, the CIA was unable to produce any evidence to
corroborate his claim. Alfred Prados, author of a 2005 Congressional
Research Service report titled “Syria: U.S. Relations and Bilateral
Issues,” listed CIA assessments of Syrian nuclear and BW programs but
none of the assessments contained any concrete evidence that Syria
actually had such programs. For example, the CIA noted that it was
“monitoring Syrian nuclear intentions with concern” but offered nothing
beyond “intentions” to show that Damascus was working to acquire a
nuclear weapons capability. Prados also noted that Syria had “probably
also continued to develop a BW capability,” this based on the fact that
Damascus had “signed, but not ratified, the Biological Weapons
Convention.” Prados conceded that “Little information is available on
Syrian biological programs.”

US president George H.W. Bush is responsible for rendering the
concept of WMD meaningless by expanding it to include chemical agents.
Before Bush, WMD was a term to denote nuclear weapons or weapons of
similar destructive capacity that might be developed in the future. Bush
debased the definition in order to go to war with Iraq. He needed to
transform the oil-rich Arab country from being seen accurately as a
comparatively weak country militarily to being seen inaccurately as a
significant threat because it possessed weapons now dishonestly
rebranded as being capable of producing mass destruction. It was an
exercise in war propaganda.

In 1989, Bush pledged to eliminate the United States’ chemical
weapons by 1999. Seventeen years later, the Pentagon is still sitting on
the world’s largest stockpile of militarized chemical agents. US
allies Israel and Egypt also have chemical weapons. In 2003, Syria
proposed to the United Nations Security Council that the Middle East
become a chemical weapons-free zone. The proposal was blocked by the
United States, likely in order to shelter Israel from having to give up
its store of chemical arms. Numerous calls to declare the Middle East a
nuclear weapons-free zone have also been blocked by Washington to
shelter Israel from having to give up its nuclear arsenal.

Pro-Assad forces are not anti-war, they are for the Assad regime's waron all opposition forces -- secular, Islamist, and Christian alike

Bolton, it will be recalled, was among the velociraptors of the Bush
administration to infamously and falsely accuse Saddam Hussein’s Iraq of
holding on to WMD that the UN Security Council had demanded it
dismantle. In effect, Iraq was ordered to disarm itself, and when it
did, was falsely accused by the United States of still being armed as a
pretext for US forces to invade the now defenceless country. Bolton may
have chosen to play the same WMD card against Syria for the same reason:
to manufacture consent for an invasion. But as Congress’s researchers
pointed out, “Although some officials…advocated a ‘regime change
strategy’ in Syria” through military means, “military operations in
Iraq…forced US policy makers to explore additional options,”
rendering Bolton’s false accusations academic.

Since the only legitimate WMD are nuclear weapons, and since there is
no evidence that Syria has even the untapped capability of producing
them, much less possesses them, Syria has never been a WMD-state or a
threat to the US goal of reducing WMD proliferation. What’s more, the
claim that Washington holds this as a genuine goal is contestable, since
it has blocked efforts to make the Middle East a chemical- and
nuclear-weapons-free zone, in order to spare its protégé, Israel. It
would be more accurate to say that the United States has a goal of
reducing weapons proliferation among countries it may one day invade, in
order to make the invasion easier. Moreover, there’s an egregious US
double-standard here. Washington maintains the world’s largest arsenals
of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, but demands that countries
it opposes should abandon their own, or foreswear their development.
This is obviously self-serving and has nothing whatever to do with
fostering peace and everything to do with promoting US world domination.
One US grievance with Assad’s Syria, then, is that it refused to accept
the international dictatorship of the United States.

Economic reform (economic sovereignty)

In connection with Syria impeding the achievement of US goals in the
Middle East, the Congressional Research Service made the following
points in 2005 about the Syrian economy: It is “largely
state-controlled;” it is “dominated by…(the) public sector, which
employs 73% of the labour force;” and it is “still based largely on
Soviet models.” These departures from the preferred Wall Street
paradigm of free markets and free enterprise appear, from the
perspective of Congress’s researchers, to be valid reasons for the US
government to attempt to bring about “reform” in Syria. Indeed, no one
should be under the illusion that the US government is prepared to allow
foreign governments to exercise sovereignty in setting their own
direction economically. That this is the case is evidenced by the
existence of a raft of US sanctions legislation against “non-market
states.” (See the Congressional Research Service 2016 report, “North
Korea: Economic Sanctions,” for a detailed list of sanctions imposed on
North Korea for having a “Marxist-Leninist” economy.)

To recapitulate the respective positions of Syria and the United States on issues of bilateral concern to the two countries:

On Israel. To accept Israel’s right to exist as a
settler state on land illegitimately acquired through violence and
military conquest from Palestinians, Lebanese (the Shebaa Farms) and
Syrians (Golan), would be to collude in the denial of the fundamental
right of self-determination. Damascus has refused to collude in the
negation of this right. Washington demands it.

On Hezbollah. Hezbollah is the principal deterrent
against Israeli territorial expansion into Lebanon and Israeli
aspirations to turn the country into a client state. Damascus’s support
for the Lebanese resistance organization, and Washington’s opposition to
it, places the Assad government on the right side of the principle of
self-determination and successive US governments on the wrong side.

On WMD. Syria has a right to self-defense through
means of its own choosing and the demand that it abandon its right is
not worthy of discussion. The right to self-defense is a principle the
United States and its allies accept as self-evident and non-negotiable.
It is not a principle that is valid only for the United States and its
satellites.

On opposition to the US invasion of Iraq. The 2003
US-led aggression against Iraq was an international crime on a colossal
scale, based on an illegitimate casus belli, and a fabricated one at
that, and which engendered massive destruction and loss of life. It was
the supreme international crimes by the standards of the Nuremberg
trials. Applying the Nuremberg principles, the perpetrators would be
hanged. US aggression against Iraq, including the deployment of
“sanctions of mass destruction” through the 1990s, which led to hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and was blithely accepted by then US
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as “worth it,” was undertaken
despite the absence of any threat to the United States. The deliberate
creation of humanitarian calamities in the absence of a threat, as a
matter of choice and not necessity, in pursuit of economic gain, is an
iniquity on a signal scale. What, then, are we to think of a government
in Damascus that opposed this iniquity, and a government in Washington
that demands that Damascus reverse its opposition and accept the crime
as legitimate?

Whatever its failings, the Assad government has unambiguously adopted
positions that have traditionally been understood to be concerns of the
political left: support for self-determination; public ownership and
planning of the economy; opposition to wars of aggression; and
anti-imperialism. This is not to say that on a spectrum from right to
left that the Assad government occupies a position near the left
extreme; far from it. But from Washington’s point of view, Damascus is
far enough to the left to be unacceptable. Indeed, it is the Syrian
government’s embrace of traditional leftist positions that accounts for
why it is in the cross-hairs of the world’s major champion of
reactionary causes, the United States, even if it isn’t the kind of
government that is acceptable to Trotskyists and anarchists.

In 2003, the Bush administration listed Syria as part of a junior
varsity axis of evil, along with Cuba and Libya, citing support in
Damascus for Hezbollah and groups engaged in armed struggle to achieve
Palestinian self-determination. [16] An invasion of Syria following the
US take-over of Iraq in 2003 was contemplated, but was called off after
the Pentagon discovered its hands were full quelling resistance to its
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As an alternative to direct
military intervention to topple the Syrian government, the United States
chose to pressure Assad through sanctions and by strengthening the
opposition in Syria, hoping either to force Assad to accept Israel’s
territorial gains, end support for Hezbollah and Palestinian militant
groups, and to remake the economy—or to yield power. However, as
Congress’s researchers reveal, there were concerns in Washington that if
efforts to bolster the opposition went too far, Assad would fall to “a
successor regime (which) could be led by Islamic fundamentalists who
might adopt policies even more inimical to the United States.”
On December 12, 2003, US president George W. Bush signed the Syria
Accountability Act, which imposed sanctions on Syria unless, among other
things, Damascus halted its support for Hezbollah and Palestinian
resistance groups and ceased “development of weapons of mass
destruction.” The sanctions included bans on exports of military
equipment and civilian goods that could be used for military purposes
(in other words, practically anything.) This was reinforced with an
additional (and largely superfluous) ban on US exports to Syria other
than food and medicine, as well as a prohibition against Syrian aircraft
landing in or overflying the United States.

On top of these sanctions, Bush imposed two more. Under the USA
PATRIOT Act, the US Treasury Department ordered US financial
institutions to sever connections with the Commercial Bank of Syria.
And under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the US
president froze the assets of Syrians involved in supporting policies
hostile to the United States, which is to say, supporting Hezbollah and
groups fighting for Palestinian self-determination, refusing to accept
as valid territorial gains which Israel had made through wars of
aggression, and operating a largely publicly-owned, state-planned
economy, based on Soviet models.

In order to strengthen internal opposition to the Syrian government,
Bush signed the Foreign Operations Appropriation Act. This act required
that a minimum of $6.6 million “be made available for programs supporting democracy in Syria…as well as unspecified amounts of additional funds (emphasis added).”

By 2006, Time was reporting that the Bush administration had “been
quietly nurturing individuals and parties opposed to the Syrian
government in an effort to undermine the regime of President Bashar
Assad.” Part of the effort was being run through the National Salvation
Front. The Front included “the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist
organization that for decades supported the violent overthrow of the
Syrian government.” Front representatives “were accorded at least two
meetings” at the White House in 2006. Hence, the US government, at its
highest level, was colluding with Islamists to bring down the Syrian
government at least five years before the eruption of protests in 2011.
This is a development that seems to have escaped the notice of some who
believe that violent Islamist organizations emerged only after March
2011. In point of fact, the major internal opposition to secular Syrian
governments, both before and after March 2011, were and are militant
Sunni Islamists. Syria expert Joshua Landis told Time that White House
support for the Syrian opposition was “apparently an effort to gin up
the Syrian opposition under the rubric of ‘democracy promotion’ and
‘election monitoring,’ but it’s really just an attempt to pressure the
Syrian government into doing what the United States wants.”

The US Congress researchers noted that despite “US calls for
democracy in the Middle East, historically speaking, US policymakers”
have tended to favor “secular Arab republics (Egypt) and Arab monarchies
(Jordan and Saudi Arabia.)” They noted too that since “the rise of
political Islam as an opposition vehicle in the Middle East decades
ago, culminating in the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran, US
policymakers have been concerned that secular Arab dictatorships like
Syria would face rising opposition from Islamist groups seeking their
overthrow.” “The religiously fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood,”
which the Bush administration enlisted to pressure the Assad government,
had long been at odds with the secular Syrian government, the
researchers noted.

Today, Islamic State operates as one of the largest, if not the
largest, rebel groups in Syria. A 2015 Congressional Research Service
report cited an “unnamed senior State Department official” who observed:

We’ve never seen something like this. We’ve never seen a
terrorist organization with 22,000 foreign fighters from a hundred
countries all around the world. To put it in context—again, the numbers
are fuzzy—but it’s about double of what went into Afghanistan over 10
years in the war against the Soviet Union. Those Jihadi fighters were
from a handful of countries.”

Islamic State differs from other militant Islamist opponents of the
Syrian government in seeking to control territory, not only in Syria,
but in Iraq and beyond. As such, it constitutes a threat to US
domination of Iraq and influence throughout the Middle East and north
Africa. In contrast, ideologically similar groups, such as Jabhat
al-Nusra, limit the scope of their operations to Syria. They, therefore,
constitute a threat to the Syrian government alone, and have proved, as
a consequence, to be more acceptable to Washington.

Assad demonstration held in Jerusalem against US intervention

The US government has publicly drawn a distinction between Islamic
State and the confined-to-Syria-therefore-acceptable rebels, seeking to
portray the former as terrorists and the latter as moderates, regardless
of the methods they use and their views on Islam and democracy. The
deception is echoed by the US mass media, which often complain that when
Russian warplanes target non-Islamic State rebels that they’re striking
“moderates,” as if all rebels apart from Islamic State are moderates,
by definition. US Director of Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged
that “moderate” means little more than “not Islamic State.” He told the
Council on Foreign Relations that “Moderate these days is increasingly
becoming anyone who’s not affiliated with” Islamic State.

The rebels are useful to the US government. By putting military
pressure on Damascus to exhaust the Syrian army, they facilitate the
achievement of the immediate US goal of “forcing a negotiated settlement
to the conflict that will see President Assad and some his supporters
leave office while preserving the institutions and security structures
of the Syrian state,” [28] as Congress’s researchers summarize US
strategy. Hence, Islamic State exists both as a useful instrument of US
policy, and as a threat to US domination and control of Iraq and the
broader Middle East. To Washington, the terrorist organization is a
double-edged sword, and is treated accordingly. US airstrikes on Islamic
State appear calculated to weaken the terrorist group enough that it
doesn’t gain more territory in Iraq, but not so much that pressure is
taken off Damascus. A tepid approach to fighting the hyper-sectarian
terrorist group fits with US president Barack Obama’s stated goal of
degrading and ultimately destroying Islamic State, which appears to mean
destroying it only after it has served its purpose of exhausting the
Syrian army. In the meantime, the anti-Shiite cut-throats are given
enough latitude to maintain pressure on Syrian loyalists.

Congress’s researchers concur with this view. They conclude that “US
officials may be concerned that a more aggressive campaign against the
Islamic State may take military pressure off the” Syrian government. This means that the US president is moderating efforts to destroy
Islamic State to allow a group he decries as “simply a network of
killers who are brutalizing local populations” continue their work
of brutalizing local populations. If he truly believed Islamic State was
a scourge that needed to be destroyed, the US president would work with
the Syrian government to expunge it. Instead, he has chosen to wield
Islamic State as a weapon to expunge the Syrian government, in the
service of building up Israel and fostering free market and free
enterprise economies in the Middle East to accommodate US foreign
investment and exports on behalf of his Wall Street sponsors.
By Stephen Gowans

While the sun seems to never set on the Madaya propaganda, Kafarya
and Foua remains in the media shade. Still barely mentioned in
mainstream media, the residents of Kafarya and Foua continue their daily
struggles of a life under NATO backed terrorist siege.

The precarious ceasefire that has been broken many times since it was
first implemented in August 2015, is still shattered by regular
shelling of civilian homes in these two Idlib villages. I was speaking
with one resident last week when he had to cut the conversation short as
a house nearby had been hit by the terrorist shelling.

Anyone attempting to enter or leave the villages is liable to be shot
by terrorist snipers positioned in the surrounding countryside. The UN
still claims insurmountable difficulties and an inability to bypass the
Ahrar al Sham checkpoints along the road into Kafarya & Foua.Recent air drops by the Syrian Arab Air Force have succeeded in
breaking the siege and supplying minimal medicines & food but the
fuel situation is still desperate. The only delivery made back in
January of a meagre 10,000 litres, is rapidly running out leaving
hospitals unable to provide emergency treatment and ongoing chronic
illness care.

One of the most heartbreaking images sent through to me is of a
family member struggling to keep their relative alive by manual
artificial respiration. There is no electricity to run the machinery
that would normally keep them alive. Family members take it in turns to
maintain the vital supply of oxygen or else this patient will die. Life
hangs in the balance wherever you look in Kafarya and Foua. A
malevolent, hostile force camped on their doorstep and villagers
starving, cold and eking a miserable existence among the remains of
their homes inside these decimated villages.

Barely any medical supplies remaining.

A few days ago tiny baby Zahraa relinquished her hold on life,
succumbed to the starvation that had wracked her body from the moment
she was born. She was not mentioned by the Guardian or the New York
Times. She is irrelevant to the propagandists, life is meaningless to
them unless it serves their purpose to demonize the Syrian Government
and Army.

The people of Kafarya and Foua maintain their valiant struggle
against the forces that bear down upon them and they resist in silence,
an externally imposed silence. Like so many of the Syrian people they
know only too well who is the enemy in their midst and it is not the
Syrian Arab Army. Their Army is the Syrian
people, as Mother Agnes Mariam de la Croix expressed so eloquently.
They know their enemy are the NATO US proxy thugs camped among them
bringing pestilence and death. These preying locusts will be driven out
of Syria by the peoples Army and their allies and the children of
Kafarya and Foua will be liberated from the pall of terror that has been
hanging over them for almost 5 years.

“Humanism is the only – I would go so far as saying the
final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices
that disfigure human history.” ~ Edward Said.

“Yesterday, at 13:55 Moscow time (10:55 GMT), two
American A-10 assault aircraft entered Syrian airspace from Turkey, flew
right to the city of Aleppo and bombed targets there,”

Konashenkov referenced Pentagon spokesman Steve Warren who had claimed that, “with
the destruction of the two main hospitals in Aleppo by Russian and
regime attacks, over 50,000 Syrians are now without any access to
live-saving assistance.”
Yet, Warren did not provide the hospitals’ coordinates, the time of
the airstrikes, or the source of the information. Konashenkov said he
provided “absolutely nothing.”
And, continuing he presented the central problem for the US claim:

“No Russian warplanes carried out airstrikes in Aleppo
city area yesterday. The nearest target engaged was over 20km away from
the city.”

Moreover, he said the Russians “did not have enough time to clarify what exactly those nine objects bombed out by US planes in Aleppo yesterday were,” meaning that it very well could have been the US planes that destroyed the hospitals.
The Russians are apparently tired of US propaganda and Konashenko bluntly stated the following:

“What they do first is make unfounded accusations against
us – to deflect blame away from themselves. If it goes on like this,
we’re going to make two media briefings: one for ourselves, another for
those coalition guys,”“Now they criticize us, saying we fly wrong way and bomb wrong places. Should we send them more maps?”

“If you look at how Western media presents information,
it looks like the cities not controlled by the Syrian government are
full of peaceful opposition and human rights activists,”“They know for sure that neither the Russian Air Force nor the Syrian government troops ever deliver strikes on non-combatants.”

Aleppo has become the center piece of a new propaganda war
against both the legal Syrian government and Russians operating in
Syria legally. As Konashenkov insinuates, Aleppo is absolutely not
filled with ‘peace opposition and human rights activists’, but armed
groups of what can only be classified as terrorists.